Editor’s Note:

May 22, 2019

Transgenderism: A Leftist Weapon Against the Family

Emmett McGroarty, J.D., is a frequent writer and speaker about parental rights in their children’s education. He is co-author of Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty. He also co-authored Controlling Education from the Top: Why Common Core Is Bad for America from the Pioneer Institute. He is co-founder of truthinamericaneducation.com, and his published works have appeared in, among others, Breitbart, The Christian Post, Crisis, The Daily Caller, The Federalist, FoxNews.com, New York Post, Public Discourse, The Hill, Townhall, USA Today, and the Washington Times.

Jane Robbins, J.D., is an independent researcher and writer whose published works have appeared in, among others, The Federalist, Truth in American Education, The Hill, Crisis, The Christian Post, Breitbart, The Heartland Institute, Education News, The Daily Caller, New York Post, and The American Spectator. She is co-author of Deconstructing the Administrative State: The Fight for Liberty, as well as the Pioneer Institute’s Controlling Education from the Top: Why Common Core Is Bad for America.

Reprinted with permission.

The Los Angeles Times recently published an approving article about schools’ introducing kindergartners to gender dysphoria (otherwise known as transgenderism). This topic has been much in the news lately, especially after a California charter school — without notifying parents — held a “gender-reveal ceremony” for a confused little boy. The teacher then read to the other children, now confused as well but for other reasons, from a book written by a dysphoric teenager. The Times thinks this is all fine because “experts” from the radical Gay, Lesbian, and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) say it is.

Leftists insist that this kind of activity in schools is necessary to make dysphoric children feel accepted and secure. Maybe. But there is a darker agenda at work, one that has been in play for at least a century.

If you were educated before the onset of Common Core, you probably read the 1932 British novel Brave New World. One aspect of the “utopia” described by Aldous Huxley was the forced sexualization of children. Young children were sent into the gardens naked and encouraged to engage in “ordinary erotic play.” Any child who resisted was trundled off to the Assistant Superintendent of Psychology to determine if he or she was mentally ill.

Why would a totalitarian government do this? Wouldn’t it be more likely to crack down on sexual relations, the better to control every aspect of human behavior?

The answer is well elucidated by J. Douglas Johnson in a recent essay for Crisis magazine. Johnson explains that the term “sexual revolution” was coined in the 1920s by Dr. Wilhelm Reich, an atheist psychiatrist in Sigmund Freud’s clinic who joined the Communist Party and referred to himself as a “Freudo-Marxist.” Reich devoutly believed in the Marxist idea of utopia, but he recognized the problem with Marx’s proposition that such human happiness could be achieved only by the abolition of religion. When Judeo-Christian religious beliefs were so deeply ingrained in Western countries, how could their influence be eradicated?

Reich understood that Soviet-style brute force couldn’t accomplish this goal — but Western societies could be hollowed out from within. And the best way to accomplish this, he argued, was to spark a “sexual revolution” that would destroy the natural family.

The family was key. Religious faith is passed down through the family, with parents not only teaching children the faith but taking them to church. But fatherless families tend not to be church-going families. So the goal was to remove fathers, and what better way to accomplish that than through widely accepted sexual permissiveness?

“Reich correctly surmised,” Johnson writes, “that the way to knock the props out from underneath the American family would be to condition Western man to see contraception, fornication, pornography, sodomy, etc. as perfectly normal and not unhealthy things.” Reich also urged implementation of sex education in schools as the best way to “divest parents of their moral authority.”

The result of this officially endorsed permissiveness — and the absolute intolerance for any competing views, even unto dismissing parents’ objections to what the schools are doing to their children — is an exploding illegitimacy rate (from 3 percent in 1929 to about 40 percent today). Fatherless families weaken ties to religious faith, in turn creating the fertile ground needed for the government to plant its totalitarian roots.

First the government destroys the family, then it “has no choice” but to step in to take the family’s place in the resulting chaos. Evil, but ingenious.

Viewed in this light, the current official enthusiasm for pushing transgenderism on young children makes more sense. When it comes to sex and gender there are no rules, the schools insist, and anyone who suggests otherwise — even your mom and dad, kids! — is a bigot. You can do whatever you want to do, you can even be whoever or whatever you want to be. And the benevolent government will be there to pick up the pieces.

This has nothing to do with helping confused children. As Joy Pullmann writes at The Federalist, those kids are pawns, acceptable collateral damage in the culture war. And the goal of the war is the obliteration of the family, of human nature, and of our society as we know it.

The ever-provocative Camille Paglia has pointed out that, throughout history, a society’s embrace of androgeny generally precedes civilizational collapse (consider ancient Greece and Weimar Germany). Maybe we should start teaching history again. Or, we could just devote school time to gender-reveal ceremonies. Our choice.